Reformers to Radicals (4 page)

Among the Appalachian Volunteers working in the Southern mountains, the power of local people became most apparent when some of the broader issues of the decade, for example, the Vietnam War, intruded into their discussions about the nature of their work. Already engaged by 1966 in a serious battle with local elected officials in eastern Kentucky for control of the reform agenda, the Volunteers lost the support of the local people—those very people who, they claimed, determined AV action—when a number of them took a stand in opposition to the war. This, coupled with the forces already aligned against them, spelled disaster for the reformers.
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Beyond the significance of the role of the impoverished mountaineers, the manner in which the Volunteers' antagonists mobilized against them bears scrutiny and points toward a new understanding of American radicalism. Defined by Daniel Pope as a relative term that is bound by the context in which it occurs,
radicalism
is about change. In the postwar period, however, when change was the goal of policy makers and activists at both the national and the local levels, this simple definition is of little help. Fortunately, Pope provides further clarification. “Equality,” he claims, “[is] a central objective and core value of American radical movements and ideas.” Radicals are those who use “illegitimate means” to achieve their objectives.
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While both civil rights and antipoverty advocates, especially toward the end of the decade, sought political, economic, and social equality, the question of “illegitimacy” obscures the issue. On an immediate level, how can a group that professes the desirability of equality gain the label of
radical
in a nation whose very ideology claims a like goal? More fundamental concerns involve Pope's all-important “context” and “illegitimate means.” As both civil rights activists and antipoverty warriors increased their efforts, their opposition countered with police dogs, fire hoses, nightsticks, charges of sedition, the manipulation of the judicial system, and their own brand of violence. Given the context and the means employed, those opposed to the Great Society and civil rights used illegitimate means and are as deserving of the label
radicals
as are the activists.
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In the face of an all-out attack by their opponents, the War on Poverty activists, in and beyond the Southern mountains, crumbled. Questions remain,
however, regarding the success of their antipoverty programs. Certainly, poverty still exists, and it would be foolhardy to expect its eradication within the span of one presidential administration. Nevertheless, the effort did suffer from the “political demand” for “quick and visible results.” Beyond this, the activists themselves had trouble reconciling their hierarchical organization with their notions of equality. They struggled to replace older institutions that they interpreted as oppressive with more equitable ones, and they were decidedly less than successful working within the established system. More important, however, the trouble with evaluating the accomplishments of the War on Poverty and its participants lies within that war itself. How can community development and community action be evaluated when those notions lacked clear definitions and were understood differently by the various people involved? To local officials and program planners, they essentially meant solidifying their control over any new federally sponsored programs, while, to local people, they involved “political organizing and genuinely local autonomy.”
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In the end, to determine whether the War on Poverty met the criteria for failure—or success—the perspective from which the criteria were drawn must be identified.

Ultimately, the War on Poverty produced neither victors nor heroes. In the case of the Volunteers, though their analysis of the sources of Appalachian poverty was headed in the right direction and they compelled the enforcement of existing laws, they lost when they abandoned their focus on local people, asserted their own agenda, and attempted a frontal assault on their more powerful adversaries. Likewise, while the “radicals” on the right halted the War on Poverty, watched the activist organizations disband, and maintained their control of the social, political, and economic hierarchy, they faced a reinvigorated local population that continued to seek greater autonomy. Unfortunately, the results of the “war” for the local people were also mixed. While many gained at least economically from the federal largesse that the poverty programs brought to the mountains, they were caught between two external forces, a reform movement (the AVs) that thought it knew better and those industrial interests (particularly coal) that had dominated the region since the dawn of the twentieth century.

Finally, the nation too won and lost as a result of 1960s activism. On the positive side of the ledger, with the passage of such measures as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of the following year, along
with the social programs of the era, the United States did come closer to achieving its democratic ideal. Nevertheless, on the negative side, the trajectory of the activism of the decade—the self-serving nature of many of the participants and their attitudes toward those they came to help—reveals the shortcomings of America's reform tradition. By focusing on vague notions of community development and education (something seen as necessarily accompanying community development), War on Poverty planners and participants adopted, as did many of their civil rights counterparts, a reform philosophy that saw victims as the source of poverty and ignored their attempts to better their own condition.
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I can believe anything after seeing this area. I cannot describe it. . . . I wish I could do something for this string of coal camp communities. Wish I could talk to you and wish some responsible, able agency could turn some wheels favorably in this place. . . . It is under my skin, and deeper.

—Alvin Boggs, Pine Mountain Settlement School,
to the Council of the Southern Mountains,
describing the area around Black Mountain, Kentucky, 1961

The Oak Ridge, Tennessee, native George Brosi was probably atypical even for a college student, and in particular for a Southerner, in the early 1960s. In the summer of 1961, following his first year at Carlton College in Minnesota, Brosi “for the first time in [his] life . . . was exposed to Yankees that were appalled by the whole notion of anybody being from the [segregated] South or being from the hills.” “A lot of them . . . guilt-tripped” him about being from the “wrong part of the country.” “And it was true,” Brosi recalled. “I had been raised in segregation . . . with the colored and white restrooms and drinking fountains and restaurants and everything.” When he got back to Oak Ridge that summer, the “guilt-tripping” apparently had affected him. He became involved in the civil rights movement that was then “happening” and picketed a segregated laundromat in his hometown.
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In the winter of 1962, the “whole cultural contrast” between the elite at his Northern private school and the situation in the South precipitated Brosi's decision to leave college and return to Tennessee, where he gained employment at a hotel in Gatlinburg. It was the same hotel that the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM)—then the leading Appalachian benevolent
organization—held its annual conference. Led by Perley Ayer, the CSM, housed at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, attempted to incorporate every possible interest, from corporations and churches to state and county governments, into its reform efforts. By the summer of 1963, Brosi, who increasingly became involved in the emerging youth movement in the early part of the decade, made the connection that poor whites needed their own movement and joined the CSM. Interestingly, Brosi claimed that he was one of only two CSM employees who, in late 1963, supported the Democrat Lyndon Johnson over the Republican Barry Goldwater.
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While at the Council, Brosi worked closely with Milton Ogle, the CSM's community development specialist and the eventual leader of the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs), a college student–based reform project started by the Council. In fact, Brosi asserts that he was on the very first AV project. Though he had returned to Carlton by then, Brosi “happened” during the Christmas break of 1963–1964 “to stop by [the CSM office] . . . to shoot the shit with Ogle, . . . [who] said ‘hey we're going out to this schoolhouse, why don't you come along?' and I said what the hell. . . . This is the very first time we've ever gone out on this new program.” Thus, Brosi accompanied CSM staff and a number of college volunteers on a school-repainting effort in Harlan County, Kentucky. “At this point,” Brosi contends, “[Ogle] was . . . very, very conservative politically and at that point his vision of the AVs was a ‘Perley Ayer, power company, chamber of commerce kind of vision: that it's too bad this schoolhouse needs paint . . . if we paint it the situation will be better.'” This initial AV project reflected the growing national attention paid to impoverished areas, such as Appalachia, in the post–World War II era and the cooperative, New Deal, top-down approach that influenced reformers on virtually every level at that time.
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Though Brosi claimed that he attempted to debate Ogle concerning the merits—or the lack thereof—of a simple school-painting project, he also contended that Ogle remained wedded to his conservative ideology, and the discussion did not go far. Nevertheless, many Americans other than Brosi wanted to talk about Appalachia during the postwar years. Always part of the national conversation, especially since the coal industry entered the region at the dawn of the twentieth century, Appalachia—or, more precisely, Appalachians—took on added importance in the 1950s and 1960s. Responding to a number of developments, including the mechanization
of the coal industry and the labor demands precipitated by global conflict, Appalachians now inhabited urban industrial centers, particularly those in the Upper Midwest, in unprecedented numbers. This “great migration,” as James S. Brown of the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of Kentucky demographer George A. Hillery Jr. called it in 1962, created a host of social, economic, and political problems for those cities and for Appalachia. While the region suffered the drain of its most productive citizens, urban centers such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago witnessed a massive influx of Southerners who were, many established residents determined, ill suited for city life.
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Focusing on these Southern migrants, the Cleveland resident Adelbert Bodnar informed the Council of the Southern Mountains that his city had “trouble . . . with ‘Sam' [an acronym for ‘southern Appalachian migrant'] . . . in the area of behavior.” While the adults were responsible for drunken brawls, robbery, burglary, vandalism, and gang fights, their children used the foulest language. No wonder, Bodnar wrote, that decent people call them “poor white trash.” These new migrants also threatened the economic security of established residents. Since the 1930s, industry increasingly relocated to the South, lured by right-to-work laws and tax breaks, and Cleveland now faced “hordes of hillbillies [who came] up here to take away what jobs [it had] left for [its] own citizenry.” “Keep them back in the hills,” Bodnar admonished the CSM, “where they belong.” He also implored that the “hillbillies” be taught to have respect for order and property.
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Bodnar's admonition reflected the dual nature of the problem faced by the Council. On the one hand, the CSM needed to help this “poor white trash” adjust to city life, and, on the other, it hoped to stem the “brain and talent” drain that plagued the region. This latter goal in particular fit the CSM's long-standing mission in Appalachia. Founded in 1913 in Atlanta by John C. Campbell, the Council of Southern Mountain Workers—later renamed the Council of the Southern Mountains—brought together “mountain workers” to discuss the difficulties of their labors. Composed mostly of rural doctors, ministers, and social workers, the Council became the permanent organization for those who sought to improve living conditions in the hills. Membership was open to all persons, institutions, or foundations working toward the betterment of the mountaineers.
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In 1925, the CSM established a permanent headquarters at and a close working relationship with Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky. The association between the two remained until 1949, when dwindling funds forced the Berea office to close. With money and influence rapidly fading, the Council hired Perley Ayer, a rural sociologist from New Hampshire then working in Tennessee, to oversee the organization's supposed final days. Though the CSM was all but bankrupt when he took control in 1951, after he reopened the Berea office Ayer revived an association that, by the mid-1960s, would become the largest, most significant social service agency operating in the Appalachian coalfields and in those Northern cities to which Appalachians had migrated in search of employment.
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Though the CSM was the Appalachian region's leading advocacy organization, its members certainly were not the only people concerned about Appalachia, America's cities, and the relationship between the two. Critics as diverse as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the journalist Michael Harrington, and the psychiatrist Robert Coles reflected the growing concern and contributed to the emerging ideas about poverty's causes and solutions. Galbraith contrasted a “new” poor, a minority of the population that had failed to tap into the economic, political, and social gains accruing to most Americans since the advent of the New Deal, with an older general, societywide poverty of the late nineteenth century. Because this new poverty encompassed a numeric minority, he concluded, the larger
affluent society
could effectively ignore it. It was the hidden poor that Harrington recognized in his influential 1963
The Other America
. Adding a cultural element to Galbraith's demographic characterization, Harrington claimed: “To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.” Not just ignored, Harrington's poor were invisible, hidden by urban skyscrapers and Appalachia's hills. Focusing on children, Coles directly linked urban and rural poverty. “Many of the children I observed in Southern cities,” he reported, “have cousins whose parents are migrant farmers, or sharecroppers, or ‘mountain folk' from the Appalachia hills.” Coles looked further into the lives of those “cousins” who remained on farms or in the mountains “and eventually the children of Northern cities who must also face social isolation, segregation, desegregation—in brief, the dislocated, hard living that is still America's gift to some of its young.”
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